Delicious, the original king of shared online bookmarking, is
now in the hands of YouTube's
founders, after a popular outcry saved it from being shut down by
Yahoo.

Chad Hurley and Steven Chen, who sold YouTube to Google for $1.65
billion dollars in 2006, will integrate Delicious into
their new company, AVOS,
and start running Delicious in July.

Delicious, one of the pioneers of the idea of taking something
users used to do privately and making it public, was snapped up by
Yahoo in 2005 for a reported $30 million. But the product
languished under its new master and its founder Joshua Schachter left in 2008. Afer a sting at Google,
Schachter is now running a stealth startup called Tasty
Labs.

Delicious appeared in December on a leaked Yahoo roadmap,
alongside seven others including AllTheWeb and Buzz, as products
that Yahoo was going to kill off. (Note: Yahoo says the plan all
along was to sell Delicious, though other products on the sunset
slide have just been shutdown, such as MyBlogLog.)

But the news prompted a groundswell of support from longtime
users, promoting Yahoo to declare it had no intention of closing
Delicious. Still, the news sent many to a similar site
called Pinboard, a pay site that can import Delicious
links.

But Hurley and Chen say they aren't buying the company for
nostalgia's sake and have big plans for it, saying they want to
"take on the challenge of building the best information discovery
service on the web".

"We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save
and share content they discover anywhere on the web," Hurley said
in a press release.

That mission has them competing with the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google
search and the increasingly popular StumbleUpon.

User's private and public bookmarks and tags will only be
transferred for those who opt-in to the new ownership. Those who
don't care for that idea can export their data.

AVOS says building a Firefox 4 plug-in for Delicious is a top
priority.

Hurley and Chen are both part of the so-called Paypal Mafia --
former PayPal
employees who are responsible for founding sites ranging from Yelp
to Slide and funding numerous other ventures, including
Facebook.